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Happy New Year, Gerrit Code Review

It has been a hectic and productive year for ourselves at GerritForge and the Gerrit Code Review Community.
We want to take this opportunity to recap some of the milestones of the 2019 and the exciting perspectives for 2020 and beyond.

Gerrit Code Review, 2019 in numbers

Gerrit had over 120+ contributors from all around the world coming from 33 different companies and organisations, which is excellent. There is a robust 6% increase in the number of commits (+231 commits) but a reduction in the number of contributors (-7 authors).

With regards to the overall trend of commits during the year, the success of the Gerrit User Summit 2019 in Sunnyvale is visible, with an increase of the rate of commits around October/November.

Top-three projects of the 2019

Gerrit (1,626 commits) is, of course, the most active project. However, it is visibly down in terms of number of commits from 2018 (-19%). That is a consequence of the shift of focus to the other two key components listed below, which are available as plugins and then not accounted for the overall gerrit core repository statistics.

Checks (315 commits) is the brand-new 1st class CI integration API for external build systems, such as Jenkins and Zuul. It is incredible how in just 12 months it has become robust and fully mature. It is currently used for the validation of all changes on the Gerrit project.

Multi-site (234 commits) is the long-awaited support for Gerrit that everyone has been waiting for years. It is finally available for all active and supported versions (from 2.16+ onwards).

Top-three companies contributing to Gerrit

Google is, with no surprise, still the top contributor of the Gerrit project overall. It is basically stable from 2018 (around 43%) as a confirmation of the continued commitment to the project.

GerritForge is growing significantly in the contribution to the project, with exactly half of the contributions of Google. This is a significant result from 2018 with a 7% growth of involvement.

CollabNet is sliding to the 3rd position (it was 2nd in 2018) with a 3% decrease of contributions. As noticeable mention, however, David Pursehouse from CollabNet is still the number #1 maintainer in terms of number of commits.

Even if it is outside the top#3 contributors companies, SAP deserves a special mention for its continuous involvement in the JGit project, which is at the basis of Gerrit engine, and its fantastic engagement in improving the Gerrit CI system and integrating it with the checks plugin.

Top-three achievements from GerritForge

The outstanding results of contributions of GerritForge in 2019 have been focused on three major topics.

Gerrit multi-site, released and production ready

We released the Gerrit Multi-Site plugin, allowing seamless balancing in a distributed environment, a technologically highly advanced development, crucial for very distributed companies. See https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/multi-site for more information.

Gerrit User Summits in Europe, USA and streaming

We successfully organised and executed the Gerrit User Group in Europe and the US. The event was very well received by the community with an overall attendance of some 87 on-site and 38 in streaming. Have a look at https://gitenterprise.me/2019/12/23/gerrit-user-summit-survey/ for interesting feedback on those from the attendees.
We opened our own local office in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley. A crucial move to better serve our ever-expanding US customer base.

Gerrit Analytics for the Android Open-Source Project

We kickstarted the Gerrit Analytics for the Android open-source project initiative: after the successful adoption of the automatic collection of code metrics on the Gerrit project (see https://analytics.gerrithub.io) the Android team asked GerritForge to start working on extracting the same metrics from their code.

What’s coming in 2020

Gerrit v3.2 is currently under development and it is planned to be released around April/May 2020. It represents a major milestone for the Gerrit project with the support for Java 11 and large JVM heaps, up to hundreds of GBytes. Gerrit v3.2 is definitely the release that everyone that has a big repository (mono-repos) should target as next upgrade. See the Gerrit .roadmap at https://www.gerritcodereview.com/roadmap.html for more details about the planned features.

More work and improvements on the checks plugin, with the aim of fully integrating it into everyone’s user-journey and their CI/CD pipeline. Our first blog-post of 2020 will be how to use Jenkins and Checks plugin together with GerritHub.io.

Multi-site and HA will become more integrated with Gerrit, with the aim of moving parts of their technologies (e.g. global ref-db) into JGit and thus used in Gerrit core.

The Gerrit User Summit 2020 will continue the experiment of cross-pollination with other communities, after the success of the interactions with the JGit and OpenStack communities in 2019. Bazel is the next target, as it is used as the de-facto standard build system for Gerrit and its plugins.

Again, Best wishes from your friends at GerritForge and looking forward to a continuing successful partnership in the coming years.

Luca MilanesioGerrit Maintainer, Release Manager and member of the ESC.